The Towering Sky. Катарина Макги

sigh. Of all the classes he could have taken, Cord had to be in this one?

      Professor Wang gazed coolly at him. “I know you’re all seniors and have one foot out the door already, but I don’t tolerate lateness from anyone.”

      “I’m sorry, Professor Wang,” Cord said, with his usual charming forgive-me smile. Then he marched right over to Rylin’s lab console—ignoring the several other empty spots—and slid into the seat next to her.

      Rylin kept her gaze studiously forward, pretending not to see him.

      “Despite being coerced and at best halfhearted,” the professor went on, addressing the class, “what you just heard from Mr. Anderton was an apology, a prime example of the types of social interactions we will study this year. We will explore the different forces influencing human behavior, including established social norms. We’ll discuss how these norms came to be, and what happens when someone chooses to violate them.”

       Like violating the unspoken norm of sitting next to your ex-girlfriend in class when there are plenty of open seats?

      “Today we’ll be performing the Stroop effect, a classic demonstration of how easily the human brain can be tricked. Our brains are the computers with which we interpret the world, and yet their operations are compromised far too easily. We misremember information, we forget whole stretches of time. We convince ourselves of things we know to be untrue. Now let’s get started.” Professor Wang clapped, and their tablets all lit up with the text of the lab instructions.

      Cord leaned forward onto the lab table. He’d rolled up his sleeves, in blatant defiance of the dress code, revealing the muscles of his forearms. “Long time no see, Myers.”

      Rylin kept her eyes on the lab instructions to keep from looking at him. She’d been avoiding Cord since she saw him kiss Avery at the Dubai party last year. And she had been mostly successful, until now.

      “It says here that one of us needs to put on the VR headset,” she pointed out. If Cord noticed that she was tapping at her tablet with unusual vehemence, he didn’t comment on it. He just kept looking at her with that amused smile, his lips slightly parted.

      “How was your summer?”

      Why was he trying to make small talk? “It was good,” Rylin said shortly. “You?”

      “I traveled with Brice for a while, mostly around South America. Windsurfing, scuba, you know.” No, Rylin thought, I really don’t know.

      Cord was close with his older brother, Brice, but then—like Rylin and Chrissa—they were all each other had. The Andertons had died years ago in a freak plane crash, making Cord an orphan, a celebrity, and a billionaire all at once. He had been ten years old.

      When Rylin’s mom died, Rylin had inherited nothing but a massive stack of unpaid medical bills.

      “What about you, did you go anywhere fun?” Cord asked.

      Go anywhere fun? “Not really. I had a job working for an archivist, going through film at the public library.”

      “Oh, right. I saw your snaps. That looked cool,” Cord agreed. Rylin was startled to hear that he’d been following her on the feeds.

      “I missed you at my party on Saturday,” he added. “I was excited to see what you were going to be dressed as—I couldn’t decide which was more likely, Catwoman or a punk rocker.”

      “I don’t really do costumes.” Did Cord seriously think that she would show up to the very party she’d worked for him last year, the party where he’d first kissed her?

      “Don’t do costumes? Where’s the fun in that?”

      “It doesn’t always have to be about ‘fun,’ you know,” Rylin snapped, more curtly than she’d meant to. She knew she wasn’t really being fair. But Cord needed to stop and think sometimes before just saying whatever popped into his mind.

      And there wasn’t anyone else in Cord’s life who was about to call him out like that.

      She picked up the virtual reality headpiece and settled it clunkily over her brow, shutting out the whole world, including Cord. “I’ll go first,” she said into the silence. Illuminated before her on the goggles was a blank white background.

      After a moment, Cord tapped at something to begin the lab. “Tell me what color you see.”

      The word hello appeared before her in vibrant green. Rylin blinked at it for a moment, disconcerted, before remembering that she was supposed to say the color. “Green.”

      The word disappeared, to be replaced by a dark red block letters that read purple.

      “Purple,” she said automatically and felt herself flush again. “No, wait, I mean, red—”

      Cord laughed. She tried not to wonder what his expression looked like beyond her blocked-out field of vision.

      “Don’t you see how easily your brain can be tricked!” Professor Wang’s voice crowed nearby.

      Rylin flicked a switch on the side of the VR headset and its screen evaporated into transparency. She glanced through her now clear goggles to see the professor hovering near their lab station. “I just read the word automatically,” she tried to explain.

      “Exactly!” the professor cried out. “Your analytical and visual identification neurons were firing at cross-purposes, and chaos broke out! Your own brain betrayed you!” She tapped one finger to her head before swishing off to another lab station.

      It only betrays me when Cord is around, Rylin thought with some resentment.

      She reached up to flick the side of her headset, letting the view screen repopulate with the lab program. “Okay, I’m ready.”

      “Rylin . . .” Cord reached over as if to lift the VR headset from the crown of her head, but Rylin instinctively jerked back. He didn’t get to touch her hair as if it meant nothing. He’d forfeited that right a long time ago.

      Cord seemed to realize that he’d crossed a line. “Sorry,” he mumbled, chastened. “But—I’m confused. What’s going on? I thought we were becoming friends again last year, and now I feel like you’re attacking me.”

      We were becoming friends, until I wanted to be more, and then I saw you with Avery. “Don’t worry about it,” she said stiffly. “It’s fine.”

      “It’s clearly not fine,” Cord protested.

      “Look, can we just get this lab done with, and—”

      “Forget the lab, Rylin.”

      She was startled by the flash of anger that ran through Cord’s words. Reluctantly she took off the VR headset and set it on the table.

      “What is it?”

      “Why are you acting like this?”

      “I don’t know what you mean,” Rylin protested weakly—because she knew exactly what he meant, and felt suddenly ashamed of herself. She fiddled awkwardly with the strap on the headset.

      “Did I do something to upset you?” Cord pressed.

      Their eyes met, and Rylin felt herself flush a bright agonized red. Telling Cord the truth meant admitting how she’d felt about him last year: that she’d gone all the way to Dubai chasing him. Yet some part of her insisted that she owed Cord an explanation, no matter how much it stung her pride.

      “I saw you with Avery. In Dubai,” she said quietly.

      Rylin watched as he sorted through the implications of her words. “You saw Avery kiss me?” he demanded at last.

      Rylin gave a miserable nod, not trusting herself to speak. Even though it was months ago—even though she was with Hiral now, and it shouldn’t matter—Rylin felt the shame of that night stealing over her,